I gotta give it to you guys. The foresight to prevent a disaster is 10/10. Top tier. Well done.
to be honest, this should have been done way earlier.
Still glad you're doing it now!
Yeah it seemed funny at first but the longer this went on the creepier it got as we all realized this isn't just a catfish.
Whoever is doing this to the actual person in the photos is a terrible human being and should go climb under a rock for the rest of their lives.
I can't wait for the future 4 hour video deep dive into Nicole history and lore.
Is this Nicole thing really still a thing? That’s so like back when I still had a 401k.
So was it last week or the day before yesterday? It all happens so fast, I can't - and frankly - refuse to catch up.
Wait, there are people who genuinely believe she's the one behind it?
I thought it was pretty obvious that she's the target of harassment. Some people must be new to the Internet
Yeah, I've been targeted by enough romance spam that I just assume any photo of a woman I don't know was probably stolen from some random Tumblr or Instagram.
Thank you for your work managing the spam waves!
Considering the spammer has used so many different photos, and they all seem to be "in the moment" webcam photos, I suspect they may have webcam spyware on the victim's computer
She looks to me like a college student attending an online class. Looks like it's shot on a laptop's built-in camera, lighting is whatever, she's dressed casually and comfortably, facial expression is neutral or even bored...
If you're taking a college class via Zoom, can you see your classmates' webcams?
with the content i've seen it gave me more of an impression of being captures of a live stream, but that's just guessing
Could be completely AI generated with variations of the same person. But that doesn't really matter, the spam needs to go.
Is this the person some folks around here were referring to as the "Fediverse chick?"
Yes, as that is how "she" initially introduced herself
Was that a real introduction or simply another person using a stolen identify?
It's almost certainly someone using pictures they took from a live stream
That is the point of this post. It was always considered to be spam and folks were trying to figure out what the motivation was and now they are working on the theory they are trying to be a dick to someone.
What of the recent NSFW/gore images that were shared? Has that been reported to authorities?
Not expecting police to solve it, but at least it would be on their radar.
we looked into it, we currently believe that to be a copycat not related to the other pms.
the lemmy.world account involved in that was most certainly compromised from an unrelated data breach and all connections originated from IPs linked to an anonymization service, so there's also not much to follow up on.
we will reconsider this if it happens again.
This annoys the fuck out of me and I hope whoever is behind it doesn't realize their goals, because I don't want lemmy to degrade into a bunch of spam PMs.
part of a larger scale harassment campaign against the person depicted
Oh boy that's horrible, if true I hope she has reported it to police, and they can help her.
Damn, I never thought about it this way. Wow. I always took it as a funny thing not thinking of the person in the photo being an actual person who could very well be harassed. Thank you for bringing this to light. Whoever thought of this is a good human being. <3
Yay, fediverse lore!
Would rather more positive lore, but I guess it is fediverse lore. Just checked from curiosity, all but 2 messages I have got are from Nicole bots, 1 was another spammer and the other an automated "welcome to this community" bot message.
Remember that guy who wanted to know how not to poop for three days!?
Sorry if this isn't the right place to ask, but are you able to confirm whether admins have reported this to the police?
Even if violence hasn't been perpetrated, the harassment is still a crime surely.
I don't know if others have, I only know that we (Lemmy.World, Fedihosting Foundation) have not reported it to the police.
I don't have high hopes that the police would be able to do anything about this. For the harassment against the person shown in the images, that would likely have to be reported by them directly for the police to take that up.
For random online spam, as in harassment of fediverse users receiving the PMs, that seems like it would be an extremely low priority for police. It's also likely fairly difficult to impossible to follow up on, considering that the person sending the PMs most likely used a VPN to access these accounts.
Hmm.
The people receiving the spam are not being harassed, obviously.
The woman depicted is very likely the target of harassment.
Sharing the images depicting violence is tantamount to a threat of violence.
As admins, you're not just witnesses but the stewards of a community and the representatives of many thousands of people in this matter.
Pre-empting what the police will do is not a reason not to report. You don't know what they will do. They might do nothing at you would have wasted 15 minutes. On the other hand perhaps Nicole has been trying to get a restraining order against some creep but has been unable to due to lack of evidence.
I've heard that if you actually add her on friendica, the mayor of Toronto shows up at your house and gives you an old fashioned.
I have no context for this and thought it was an April fools joke left up but no, this is a real problem here?
I think I've gotten about 5 messages in total. Multiply that across the fediverse, and that's potentially a lot of irritation.
WTF is a Nicole image
Edit: After seeing responses…. I got it weeks ago but just ignored it as spam and didn’t even read it. The pic jogs my memory
I can't believe I managed to never get one of these spam messages. I didn't even know what a Nicole was until the week or two ago.
What kind of a loser does this to someone?
I'm just guessing here, but maybe a rejected suitor? Or a person they're beefing with? A mentally ill person who found these pictures and decided to direct their hate at them? People do all sorts of weird stuff for all sorts of weird reasons.
I've been thinking this since it started and saying it for a bit. I don't understand at all how there were memes of this on the front page all the time and it took this long to do even this. Has there been any attempt at an effort to notify whoever is in the picture that this is happening? I would like to help if possible.
I think "notify her" feeds the harassment they're referring to, even if contacting her is well intended
This Community is intended for posts about the Lemmy.world server by the admins.
For support with issues at Lemmy.world, go to the Lemmy.world Support community.
Any support requests are best sent to info@lemmy.world e-mail.
If you would like to make a donation to support the cost of running this platform, please do so at the following donation URLs.
If you can, please use / switch to Ko-Fi, it has the lowest fees for us
